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Tue, 03 Mar 2015 21:30:33 +0000Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Managementen-gbArt in Plain Sight: A Tale of Two Librarieshttp://www.rcreader.com/art/a-tale-of-two-libraries/
http://www.rcreader.com/art/a-tale-of-two-libraries/More than a century separates the opening dates of the most recent and the oldest public-library buildings in the Quad Cities. The differences between these buildings reflect our changing relationship to the environment, and their architecture reflects the evolution of the library from a symbol of culture to a community center.

Davenport’s Eastern Avenue branch library (at 6000 Eastern Avenue) opened a year ago on July 10. The horizontal shape of the building and curved entrance relate to its surrounding environment, an open, grassy area of gentle rolling hills. The library has been designated by the U.S. Green Building Council as a Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) building. Its environmental features include a geothermal-heating and -cooling system, stormwater-management systems for the roof and parking areas, and energy-efficient lighting. Even the building materials were selected to ensure a healthy environment for the library staff and patrons.

At the library’s entrance is a wall covered in sheets of bronze. The prominent position of the wall and its subtle patterning make it seem more like a minimalist sculpture than the means to drain water from the roof into the rain basin and bioswale. The bronze wall is set within a rain garden – planted with native plants and grasses, helping the water soak into the ground instead of running into the storm sewers. The ecologically conscious approach to the design of this building is remarkably different from the neoclassical design of libraries in the early 20th Century.

The Rock Island Main Library (at 401 19th Street in the Rock Island) opened on December 15, 1903. The building became the permanent home for a library collection that was established in 1855 and made public in 1872, making it the oldest public library in the state of Illinois. Funded primarily by Rock Island businessmen Frederick Weyerhaeuser and Frederick Denkmann, the building opened shortly before the Carnegie libraries in Davenport and Moline.

Originally called Rock Island’s Temple of Literature, the building’s fluted Ionic columns, exterior of quarried stone, and classical-styled ornamentation are indeed derived from ancient Greek and Roman temples. The dozen names incised in the frieze near the roof – from the Greek poet Homer to the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne – say, in effect, that there is an unbroken link between us and the founders of Western Civilization.

One enters the main section of the building by ascending a flight of stone steps and passing through an imposing foyer. We literally rise higher when we come into this archive of knowledge. Though one is now greeted by collections of digital information – DVDs, CDs, and audiobooks – the interior architecture is formal, creating a very different atmosphere from the more welcoming and comfortable space of the newer libraries.

The Rock Island Main Library has had public meeting rooms and a children’s collection of books – even an art gallery – from its inception. Yet this is a far cry from the community centers that libraries have evolved into. More than just lenders of books, libraries now provide Internet access and community rooms for a great range of not-for-profit organizations – from the Girl Scouts to senior groups, from choirs to quilters. When you are next looking for an a pleasant coffee shop, consider going to the library.

Contemporary architect Richard Meier expanded on this by saying: “Architecture is the greatest of the arts, and it encompasses thinking that other arts don’t even deal with. Like [the] relationship of the work to the individual human being – the person who uses it, the person who experiences it, the person who sees it, and how that person perceives that space.”

Bruce Walters is a professor of art at Western Illinois University.

This is part of an occasional series on the history of public art in the Quad Cities. If there’s a piece of public art that you’d like to learn more about, e-mail the location and a brief description to BD-Walters@wiu.edu.

Crossing the Centennial Bridge into Iowa, one is welcomed by a larger-than-life sculpture of a woman with outstretched arms. Behind her is an approximately 90-foot-long colonnade with the word “Davenport” in large capital letters across the top. This gateway is at the location of the city’s first park, Washington Square, and the statue is based on a figure that once stood there.

]]>jeff@rcreader.com (Bruce Walters)Feature StoriesThu, 05 May 2011 13:09:46 +0000Mature Beyond Their Years: The Quad City Arts High School Invitational, Through May 19http://www.rcreader.com/art/qc-arts-high-school-invitational/
http://www.rcreader.com/art/qc-arts-high-school-invitational/

The 34th-annual Quad City Arts High School Invitational features 197 artworks, and that’s a lot. But the technical ability on display is exciting, particularly if one imagines the work these high-school students might create as they mature.

As a middle-school art teacher, I’m familiar with the long process of artistic development. During high school, students who put in the practice can draw with line realistically and understand composition and visual elements. Getting students to the point where they can draw an accurate still life, or mix the correct paint hues for a portrait, however, is a milestone in itself. And young people who can not only achieve technical fluency but begin to apply a consistent visual style, and express ideas and tone, are generally in the extreme minority. Although all students in this show should take pride in their exceptional work, only about a quarter of the students have reached this even higher level.

A 22-foot-high, brightly painted yellow-orange aluminum sculpture was installed at 100 17th Street in Rock Island in 1982. Placed near the entrance of the First National Bank of the Quad Cities, it was created to invite the viewer to join the celebration of the bank’s 130th anniversary. The sculpture was titled, appropriately, Invitation.

Though the building is now the Modern Woodmen Bank building, Invitation stands in the same location. Its intense and pure color suggests a brightly colored flower, and the sculpture seems to bloom from its relatively small, rectangular base – almost like a rapidly growing plant in a vase that has become too small.

The uniform color, on the other hand, suggests industrial fluorescent yellow. Though the sculpture’s shapes are fluid, even elegant, they are formed from hard-edged, seamless sheets of metal. The sculpture’s dynamic arcs seem to describe enormous paths of flight – more akin to a jet fighter than a bird.

You can’t miss Leslie Bell’s Little Guilders. His generous use of blazing hot pink and graffiti-style drips with neoclassical nudesis a compelling and somewhat mysterious blend of figurative, narrative, and abstract painting. Of the 56 works in the 35th Annual Rock Island Fine Arts Exhibition, vivid and conceptually layered two-dimensional work such as this dominates the walls, with comparatively small yet graceful three-dimensional pieces serving as complements.

The annual exhibition, in Centennial Hall at Augustana College through May 1, includes artists who live within 150 miles of the Quad Cities and awards more than $3,000 to 10 top-judged works. This year’s show was juried by Dan Mills, an artist and the director of the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

About half the work Mills selected is exceptionally strong, balancing technique, aesthetic, and ideas. The remainder demonstrates technical skill but lacks the innovation or conceptual intrigue of the exhibit’s best pieces.

]]>jeff@rcreader.com (Michelle Garrison)ReviewsFri, 11 Mar 2011 11:25:49 +0000Vehicles for Novel Imagery: Three Artists at the Quad City International Airport, Through February 28http://www.rcreader.com/art/vehicles-for-novel-imagery/
http://www.rcreader.com/art/vehicles-for-novel-imagery/

I’ve never seen trees like Grant William Thye’s before. The textural and layered brushstrokes commonly used in rendering trees are replaced by bright, flat, organic shapes outlined in calligraphic swooshes. The result is a fresh approach to the genre that’s part classical landscape, part abstraction, and part cartoon.

This freshness and presence of a clear style are apparent with all three artists on display through February 28 in Quad City Arts’ gallery at the Quad City International Airport. Thye, Angela Dieffenbach, and Karina Cutler-Lake employ traditional genres as vehicles for novel imagery.

A large cast-bronze war memorial has stood in downtown Moline for roughly eight decades. On the sculpture’s north side is the imagery one might expect on such a memorial: an idealized soldier holding an American flag under the spread wings of an eagle. Rising through the sculpture’s center is a towering flag pole.

This is not the oldest war memorial in the Quad Cities, nor is it the most prominent or grandest. It is, however, a thoughtful – perhaps even profound – sculptural group of five figures.

Rolling farms stretching to the horizon. Salt-of-the-earth farmers. Tractors sputtering to life at sunrise. These are the images one would expect to see in the Deere & Company art collection. However, the Figge Art Museum and the agricultural-machinery manufacturer have put together an exhibit that delves much deeper, into a diverse visual exploration of the natural, the mechanical, and the interplay between the two. Contrary to what one might expect given Deere’s corporate identity, the show presents more than idealized visions of agrarian life; it frequently allows for artistic ambivalence about the industrialization of farming.

Passages is a grouping of four rectangular columns prominently placed between the Family Museum and the Bettendorf Public Library on Learning Campus Drive. The column closest to the library lies flat on the ground. In sequence, the other three stand angled at 45 degrees, 67 degrees, and finally fully vertical. The effect of these 18-foot-tall, stainless-steel columns rising in a stop-motion progression is impressive.

Yet what ultimately catches one’s attention is the brightly painted sphere perched precariously at the top of the standing column. An area the size of the sphere has been scooped out of the other columns. These smooth inverse curves are painted in the same bright colors as the sphere – yellow, red, and green – and visually soften the angular metal impact of the sculptural group. They feel like a finger’s indent in a stick of butter. The positioning of these indents creates an illusion of an upward trajectory or path that the sphere has taken.

]]>jeff@rcreader.com (Bruce Walters)Feature StoriesWed, 29 Dec 2010 16:46:58 +0000Art in Plain Sight: Sol LeWitt Workshttp://www.rcreader.com/art/art-in-plain-sight-lewitt/
http://www.rcreader.com/art/art-in-plain-sight-lewitt/(Editor’s note: This is part of an occasional series on the history of public art in the Quad Cities.)

In 1984, a site-specific sculpture by the internationally renowned artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was installed near the south entrance of the RiverCenter on Third Street in Davenport. Titled simply Tower, this sculpture was made of four 21-foot-tall slabs of concrete bolted to a framework of steel I-beams. These slabs, made of crushed marble and silica, were cast using more than a half-mile of Styrofoam strips.

Additional works by LeWitt, Wall Drawing #405 and Two Wall Drawings, were also installed in the center’s atrium at this time. Longtime LeWitt assistant Anthony Sansotta worked with area art students to make these 18-foot-long drawings. In all, roughly 30 Quad Citians helped with the installations – including art students, plasterers, carpenters, painters, cement finishers, laborers, iron workers, crane operators, truck drivers, and electricians.

Don’t look for these works at the RiverCenter, however. Tower was moved to the Figge Art Museum’s plaza in October 2004. The original wall drawings were removed from the RiverCenter, and Wall Drawing #405 was redrawn inside the Figge at the top of the stairway leading to the second-floor galleries. LeWitt claimed this new drawing is not a re-creation but is still the original artwork. He regarded his wall drawings as impermanent and repeatable. And his work is intentionally unemotional.